Memories rich as red sauce flow from Bove's customers

A line of patrons wraps around Bove's Restaurant on Tuesday evening, Dec. 15, 2015. People were waiting to be seated for dinner eight days before the restaurant closed.(Photo11: FREE PRESS FILE)Buy Photo

In 1958, spaghetti and meatballs from Bove’s Restaurant taught Bob Gilson, age 11, that food could have flavor, depth and excitement. “It was the best meal ever, and I wolfed it down,” he says today, 57 years later.

In 1986, Bove’s provided Kelly Betzina’s first meal after the arrival of her first child. Her mother delivered the takeout spaghetti to her hospital bed. “Oh, the smell got down the hall to my room before she did. It was amazing,” Betzina recalls. Her mother made the gift a family tradition, bringing Bove’s to the hospital after the birth of Betzina’s two younger children.

In 1997, 11-year-old Courtney Mason, who had never known her father, met him for the first time in a corner booth at Bove’s. “It was warm and inviting, a comfortable place” for an awkward first meeting, she remembers now.

Wednesday, Bove’s Restaurant, a family-owned Burlington red-sauce institution for 74 years, will close its doors. Customers and former customers across the country have joined the public mourning.

Three generations of the Bove family served up copious, cheap helpings of pasta behind the restaurant’s black-and-white tile façade, introducing mid-20th century Vermonters to the joys of garlic and oregano. In the process the family wrote itself into Burlington history, social and political as well as gustatory.

The family’s catering and bottled-sauce businesses will continue, but Bove’s-the-place — with its duct-taped vinyl seats, crowded aisles and garlic-scented air will be no more.

Ah, the garlic! In winter, its fragrance poured out each time the front door opened, tantalizing customers who shivered in the long line outside on Friday nights in the 1970s and ’80s.

“The white garlic sauce is still my all time favorite sauce EVER!!” customer Heather Boivin lamented on the restaurant’s Facebook page. “It'll be a very sad day for me when you close the doors.”

A revelation of flavor

The restaurant Boivin mourns opened on Dec 7, 1941, on the northern edge of Burlington’s Little Italy. Victoria and Louis Bove, immigrants from a village outside Naples, were moving up from their previous business, a horse-drawn cart from which they sold hot dogs and snacks.

Ciao, chow: Bove's Restaurant, which opened 74 years ago, will close Wednesday.(Photo11: COURTESY)

Now, they would fill the stomachs of college students, adventurous eaters and soldiers stationed at Fort Ethan Allen with spaghetti at 25 cents a plate and beer at 5 cents a glass.

Victoria could neither read nor write, but ruled the kitchen. She grew plum tomatoes in the backyard and made tender, garlicky meatballs. She added herbs with a generous hand.

When the Boves launched their business, and for nearly two decades after, homemade Italian food was as exotic as Mata Hari to many Burlingtonians.

“We didn’t have salt and pepper in our house,” recalled Gilson, a 68-year-old Burlington native. While the Gilson kitchen might have been an extreme case, even the best New England cooking in the 1940s and '50s emphasized meat, potatoes and boiled vegetables. Italian food, if it was served, came from a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.

“I grew up in the North End with a single mom. We were poor and my mom worked 12 hours a day to keep us afloat,” Gilson recounted recently. “Most evenings I ate TV dinners.”

But on that summer night just before he entered sixth grade, Gilson’s mother brought home a tub of spaghetti and meatballs from Bove’s.

“I had never tasted anything like it. Tomato sauce, garlic, onion, oregano, olive oil, Parmesan cheese! … I know it seems ridiculous to wax poetic about takeout spaghetti and meatballs, but for a boy growing up on TV dinners, it was revelatory,” he recalled.

Gilson left Vermont and made a career as a photographer, teacher and director of arts programs at New York City’s iconic 92nd Street Y, from which he recently retired. He describes himself as a good amateur cook and enthusiastic eater who has dined in fine restaurants around the world.

Nevertheless, he said, “There is no doubt in my mind, that my love of food stems directly from that first meal from Bove's.”

Buy Photo

Kenny Bora, who has served in the kitchen at Bove's in Burlington for 34 years, serves up the first brick of their homemade lasagna from a giant pan, fresh from the oven. (Photo11: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)

‘A fistful of plastic monkeys’

Louis Bove died in 1946, but by then several of the couple’s 13 children had joined their mother in the business. Dick, the youngest son, learned sauce-making from his mother and worked with her in the kitchen; Ernie, the eldest, kept the books.

Out front, son Fiore Bove — known universally as Babe — worked as bartender, sports analyst, political commentator, raconteur and friend of every child who ate in one of the booths.

No memory of mid-century childhood dining at Bove’s is complete without a reference to the little plastic monkeys Babe hung on the edge of glasses of cherry Coke and ginger ale.

“I can still see Fiore giving our oldest little guy a fistful of plastic monkeys, and the tradition was repeated for all five of our children. Thank you so much for good food, good service, and good memories,” Elizabeth Branon of Fairfield posted this fall on Bove’s Facebook page.

Babe worshipped the Yankees (and installed one of Burlington’s first televisions and a 100-foot-tall antenna to better follow baseball and football), loved horse-racing, and turned many customers into good friends.

He and the long-serving waitresses made Bove’s feel like home to regular diners.

Louis Bove opened Bove's Restaurant in 1941 with his wife, Victoria. He is pictured here with two of his daughters, Esther (standing) and Jane, and his horse-drawn food cart. He made the restaurant's wine in the basement of the family's Pearl Street home with grapes grown in the yard.(Photo11: COURTESY)

“Every Friday night my mom and dad would close up our photo studio and we’d go to Bove’s for dinner,” Pam Carr Mitchell, now of Lake Frederick, Virginia, recalled of her childhood in the 1950s. “We’d always go in through the back door — Dad was a good friend of Babe’s and they would go to Saratoga and Blue Bonnet to the races.

“You’d sit there and take in the atmosphere and Babe clinking glasses. He could wash glasses faster than anybody. I remember how fast his hands would move.”

References to Bove’s “back door” or “side door” run like a refrain through memories of the restaurant. The side door opened on the kitchen, with the bar one step through an inner doorway to the left. This was the takeout entrance, or the door you used if you knew Babe and there was a long line out front and you wanted to cut short the wait. The door wasn’t hidden, but customers still recall with pride their status as someone who could use the “secret” entrance.

“My Dad would go in the back door and people would make comments. Babe would say, ‘When you’ve come here as long as this man, you can come in the back door, too,’ ” Mitchell said.

Four of the 13 children of Louis and Victoria Bove, with their friend Art Merola (of Merola's Market), hanging out together on Pearl Street in 1941, the year the couple opened Bove's Restaurant.(Photo11: COURTESY)

The price was right

While the price of Victoria’s spaghetti and meatballs rose over time, dinner at Bove’s remained one of Burlington’s most affordable nights out. This week, a plate of the pasta sold for $8.55.

(The restaurant served plenty of other dishes — lasagna was another customer favorite — but spaghetti and meatballs seem to provoke the most nostalgia).

For families of modest income and for generations of college students at the University of Vermont, St. Michael’s College and Champlain College, eating out meant dinner at Bove’s.

“I remember my Dad telling me of his trips to Bove’s while attending UVM on the GI Bill after returning from the Pacific where he served in the Navy during WWII,” Crosby Sherman of Skillman, New Jersey, said in a Facebook post. “Money was tight after the war, but he was able to get spaghetti and a pork chop for less than a buck as I remember the story.“

“We only went out once in a blue moon — people didn’t have all that cash,” Geri Kearns of Delray Beach, Florida, recalled in a telephone interview. She remembered, as a young married woman in the 1960s, taking her 11-year-old sister to Bove’s because “that’s all we could afford” and watching her sister scoop all the bread out of the bread basket to take home because she liked it so much.

Bove’s was simply a part of life in mid-century Burlington. Hairdressers and store clerks bought takeout lunch from Bove’s. Mothers weary from a week of child-rearing put on fresh dresses, perfume and earrings for a night out with their husbands. They might encounter booths full of basketball players from Burlington High School or Cathedral High School. (John Hulburd, BHS class of ’65, remembers his coach had to help him navigate the simple menu.)

A Bove daughter, Corinne, brought some of her third grade students for their first restaurant meal. Victoria, who died in 1964, handed coffee out the side door to cops on the beat and dispatched big pots of spaghetti and sauce when there was a death in the family of any friend.

Some young customers remained loyal through young adulthood into middle age, marking stages in their lives with dinner at Bove’s.

Mary Campion LaPierre lived in a house across the street from the restaurant as a young child; ate there first with her parents; returned often with her high school sweetheart, Larry LaPierre. After their marriage, the couple celebrated the construction of their new home in Essex Junction with a picnic of Bove’s spaghetti in front of the fireplace when the home was just a shell.

Buy Photo

Dickie Bove started his first job in 1950, working for his parents at the family restaurant in downtown Burlington that they started on Dec. 7, 1941, the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Back then, spaghetti and meatballs, with a Coke, cost 35 cents.(Photo11: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS FILE)

In 1979, they chose Bove’s to celebrate the imminent addition of a son to the family. More than 30 years later, Mary LaPierre remembers where they sat (the corner booth), what they ate (“the usual, spaghetti with meat sauce and a large tossed salad”), and what they said to one another, that this would be their last Bove’s meal as a two-person family.

How to bottle atmosphere?

The 1960s and ‘70s may have been the restaurant’s heyday. Lines went out the door; Babe Bove was elected to the state Senate; Dick Bove served as an alderman.

Then, in 1980, Dick Bove played a supporting role in U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first political success. Bove and Sanders both challenged the incumbent mayor, Gordon Paquette. Bove finished a distant third, but took enough votes from Paquette for Sanders to squeak out a 10-vote victory.

The 1980s and 1990s brought changes. Ernie Bove died in 1992, Babe Bove in 1997. A third generation, Dick Bove’s sons Mark and Rick, joined the business.

Buy Photo

Mark and Rick Bove stand in front of their family's restaurant in October 2007.
Bove's Restaurant closed in 2015, but the brothers have continued their catering and sauce-making businesses. Their father, Richard Bove, was the second generation of his family to operate the restaurant. He died on Feb. 12, 2016 at the age of 78.(Photo11: FREE PRESS FILE)

New restaurants were springing up all over town. Some served inexpensive Italian food. Others catered to the changing, more cosmopolitan tastes of a new generation.

Bove’s continued to do a steady business, but by the 2000s, waiting for a booth became less common. Bove’s changed very little. The restaurant never accepted credit cards. Meals still came with soft white bread and, until very recently, with canned peas.

In 2006, Mark and Rick launched their bottled sauce business, making Bove’s available to far-flung Burlington natives.

A heated debate quickly sprang up: Was Bove’s bottled sauce a little bit of Burlington in a jar, as some former patrons argued? Or did its flavor pale compared to the same sauce served in a booth beneath the restaurant’s tin ceiling?

“I grew up eating Bove's. Born and raised Vermonter,” Rebecca Campbell, now of Clearwater, Florida, posted on Bove’s Facebook page. “I was so stoked to see your sauce on the shelf of my grocery store. (I thought) 3x as expensive as my usual sauce, but what the Hell!!!! It is Bove's!!!!! What a disappointment..... Doesn't taste the same at all.”

Buy Photo

Mark Bove announces that his family restaurant's signature pasta sauce will be made in a new facility in Milton. He made the announcement at a news conference Monday, the 74th anniversary of the restaurant's opening. which coincided with Pearl Harbor Day.(Photo11: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)

The jarred and in-restaurant sauces are the same, Mark Bove, said. What’s missing from the grocery shelf product are the bustle of the restaurant, the hanging monkeys, the crowded booths and camaraderie.

“If I could bottle the atmosphere in jars, I wouldn’t hear complaints that the sauce in jars isn’t as good as the sauce in the restaurant,” he said earlier this month.

The restaurant is closing because Dick Bove wanted to retire after five decades of sauce-making, and his sons want to focus on their bottled sauce.

When the news spread, crowds returned to Bove’s — generations of customers wanting one last meal in a place they had loved.

On Sunday, Mary and Larry LaPierre were still trying to figure out how to have one last meal. They arrived to have dinner at 6 p.m. a week ago Thursday and found a line out the door and around into the parking lot. They returned at 7:45 p.m. that night, and again on Friday night. No dice.

“We’re going to try again Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe go really early,” she said. “I just gotta go there, one last time.”